Personally, I think that the sign of a good documentary is when it sets out to “document” something and lays out the facts in the ground in a clear and proper fashion, either it be through interviews, narrations, or whatever media available. It makes it available to everyone, it tries to make it clear to anyone in the world what the subject is. The better documentary comes when those facts, or whatever the subject that the film is portraying, is laid out in a creative fashion, thus having a way of distancing itself from the television way of making documentaries, and thus the ways and creative implements available for this are practically infinite.

Now, the Great Documentary is the one that manages to have all that I’ve said so far, but at the same time, it has a Perspective, a Point of View, something that must be fundamental to a filmmaker when he sets out to make a film (specially a documentary) but more than ever, it’s the feature that most of the time seems to fail or just be missing. So, why am I saying all this? Because the subject matter, the way that it was filmed and how it’s presented, ‘El Vals de los Inútiles’ (2013), aims to be seen and regarded as a Great and Important Documentary, but it’s not, it’s just a good one.

In 2011 there were student protests all over Chile, from kids and youngster from schools and universities, and I was one student among all of them, wanting a better education: yelling and rallying in the streets, we weren’t exactly apolitical, but we knew that we couldn’t trust any organization or party of any kind if we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted a free and public education for everyone, and we weren’t going to stop until we got it.

Of course, we stopped, the tedium of seeing an unresponsive government turned many of us off, and even if today there are many schools and universities that try to revive the movement, it’s not going to compare to the strength and massive appeal as well as international repercussion that the 2011 protests had in the world, and more essentially, in the everyday political life, as to right now three of the leaders of the cause are now in Senate, and there’s an education reform in discussion right now.

So, if you can understand, it’s an important subject to me, and I want it to be treated well. And this movie wants to be something that tries to capture it in an emotive way, it manages to create the sensation of what it was, but it fails to give it context or any depth.

The other element of this film is that it features two protagonists: a high-school student of the most important public school in Santiago, Chile (The Instituto Nacional), that I also attended, and a tennis teacher who was tortured during the Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Now, they are obviously distinct characters that may give a way of contrast or giving different perspectives on the subject, but in the end they are both mostly useless to anything that ever was important about what happened in 2011.

It’s important and highly emotive to hear this now old man relate the way he was taken away and then tortured by the military, but it has absolutely no connection to anything that is going on in the streets. If it wanted to make a comparison with what happened with the police and its attitude towards children and young people in general when it came to the protests, it doesn’t come through or it just doesn’t dare to make the direct connection.

The kid just barely involves himself in the process. We see him in some streets, trying to contact some friends through his cellphone, looking at the police barricading the students, trying to hold the hordes that will later try to ask for a permission to run through the main avenue to ask for their right to be educated. But we don’t see him as an important man in the process, and one can guess that it was the point of the film, but it doesn’t come through as a point of view.

In a way, the film is a good documentary, and I can end up recommending it to anyone who hasn’t lived or knew how the process went down in Chile, as I said before, it lays out the facts and how it may feel to be there. But the way that it chooses to have two protagonists, and have both of them have practically no connection to the protests or the process itself, is no creative nor bold nor anything, it’s merely a distraction and not much else. It aims for depth, but it comes out empty.

And the film has a severe lack of Point of View towards its subject. Not because it maybe has an opinion on the whole revolution (as it was once called), but it doesn’t equate to a formed direction nor a way that the shots, the information and the speeches are chosen, it just seems that they had to work around what they shot, and while there are many inspired, informative and at times funny moments, they just seem like a mixture of everything.

I may seem furious towards this movie, and I’m really not, but I’m more disappointed that it doesn’t achieve the greatness that it sets out to be in posters, trailers and even in its first shot. But if it ever comes out of this country, it’s a good document of part of what happened, let’s hope for more.

Amicus Productions: Horror-Scifi

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965)
The Skull (1965)
Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965)
The Psychopath (1966)
Dalek's Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966)
The Terrornauts (1967)
The Deadly Bees (1967)
They Came from Beyond Space (1967)
Torture Garden (1967)
The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970)
The House That Dripped Blood (1971)
I, Monster (1971)
Tales from the Crypt (1972)
What Became of Jack and Jill? (1972)Asylum (1972)
The Vault of Horror (1973)-- And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)
From Beyond the Grave (1974)
Madhouse (1974)
The Beast Must Die (1974)
The Land That Time Forgot (1975)
At the Earth's Core (1976)
The People That Time Forgot (1977)
The Monster Club (1981)

Hammer Pictures: Horror-Fantasy-Sci Fi

The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1935)
Man in Black (1949)
Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949)
Dick Barton at Bay (1950)
Four Sided Triangle (1953)
Spaceways (1953)
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
X: The Unknown (1956)The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Quatermass 2 (1957)
The Abominable Snowman (1957)
Tales of Frankenstein (1958)Dracula (1958)The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)
The Mummy (1959)
The Stranglers of Bombay (1960)The Brides of Dracula (1960)
The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)
The Terror of the Tongs (1961)
Taste of Fear (1961)
The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
Shadow of the Cat (1961)
Captain Clegg (1962)
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Paranoiac (1963)
The Damned (1963)
Maniac (1963)
The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
The Old Dark House (1963)
Nightmare (1964)
The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
The Gorgon (1964)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)
Fanatic (1965)
She (1965)
The Nanny (1965)
The Plague of the Zombies (1966)Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
The Reptile (1966)
Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966)
The Witches (1966)
One Million Years B.C. (1966)
Slave Girls (1967)
The Mummy's Shroud (1967)
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Journey to Midnight (1968)
Journey into Darkness (1968)
The Vengeance of She (1968)
The Lost Continent (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
"Journey to the Unknown" (1968)Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969)
Moon Zero Two (1969)Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
Crescendo (1970)
The Vampire Lovers (1970)
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)Scars of Dracula (1970)
Lust for a Vampire (1971)
Countess Dracula (1971)
Creatures the World Forgot (1971)
Twins of Evil (1971)
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971)
Hands of the Ripper (1971)
Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971)
Vampire Circus (1972)Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)
Straight on Till Morning (1972)
Fear in the Night (1972)
Demons of the Mind (1972)The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974)
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
"Hammer House of Horror" (1980)
"Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense" (1984)
Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1984)
Beyond the Rave (2008)
Let Me In (2010)The Resident (2011)